Don’t buy a Tesla!

TL;DR: The Model S is a great car and it offers you an extraordinary driving experience. Tesla customer service in Europe (more specifically in Belgium) is dreadful. Tesla doesn’t take security seriously and the Model S doesn’t seem to be very mature yet. I am still loving my Model S.

The statements above are not mutually exclusive. I’m loving it, but I don’t recommend buying one. Not for the moment at least. Customer care is part of the experience of owning a car, and Tesla does it badly here in Europe.

More details about my statements above:

if you plan to call your customer service, expect waiting times in the region 1-2 hours. Yes, you read that right. Freaking hours, on the phone.

if you get in touch with someone from support, there’s no guarantee that they will actually do something to help. Recent example: called to report a problem with the left mirror. After an hour of waiting, I am told to send an email to the technical team, and they will reach back to me. That was 2 weeks ago. Nobody called.

the Model S is not mature enough. As a technical guy, I am used to technical issues. I see my Model S as a computer on wheels, so a few non-safety related bugs are tolerable. Resetting your car to fix the air conditioning flow or the internet connectivity is fine for me. But when these things start to happen on a regular basis, things can get annoying. Especially when Tesla doesn’t seem to care about it.

the Model S’s produced before June 2018 have a known vulnerability that can lead to the car being stolen with minimal effort. The solution is simple: upgrade the chip on the key fobs and re-link them with your car. Tesla fixed this problem for the cars produced after June 2018, but is asking the existing owners (pre-June 2018) to pay for the fix from their own pocket (about 250 EUR). The alternative recommended by Tesla is to disable the Passive Entry. Because that’s the normal thing to do after you sell a $100k+ car with a security hole in it: ask the customer to disable a feature for which he already paid. But hey, they take security seriously…

All that being said, I still love to drive my Model S. But I don’t recommend anyone buying one. There are other electric car producers out there. Look for one that actually gives a s*it about you. Unfortunately Tesla is not one of them. Yet.